Black Women, Pornography, and Economies of Desire

Mireille Miller-Young uses pornography as a case study for illustrating strategies of black female agency in A Taste for Brown Sugar. Against narratives that would position pornography as degrading or antifeminist, Miller-Young shows us women who capitalize on the desire for black female bodies in order to pursue their own goals. In addition to charting the shifting nature of this desire for blackness, the book employs various strategies—archival research, close reading, and interviews—to showcase black female agency as a matter of intricate negotiations. The first four chapters offer a chronology of black women’s participation in pornography, while the last three chapters are focused on how women have negotiated their participation in an industry rife with racism and sexism. This is a story about labor.

The historical trajectory of the book follows the long twentieth century: Miller-Young begins with stag films of the early twentieth century and ends with Internet pornography. In each chapter, she illustrates a different representational problematic concerning blackness and performs close readings of the images to see how these actresses have managed to subvert these shifting racist tropes. In “Sepia Sex Scenes,” Miller-Young locates agency in the actress’ eye movements, which add a veneer of levity or critique to the sexual encounter and challenge the films’ attempts to have their bodies stand for biological racial difference. The next chapter reads moving-image and still pornography from the 1960s and 1970s to highlight the emergence, from civil rights discourses and reactionary fears of black power, of a new version of black femininity, which is imagined to be voracious and sexually aggressive. Following this, Miller-Young considers pornography’s move to VHS and the construction of a niche market in black female porn stars. A central question in this third chapter is the relationship between the sedimentation of blackness as servility and the possibilities for these stars to find agency in their depictions of racist stereotypes. Finally, in “Ho Theory,” Miller-Young traces the mutual embrace between hip-hop and pornography as a way to think about black women’s association with criminality and degradation. Miller-Young writes that black women have been seen as “a figure of moral corruption, social deviance, and economic drain, especially in the field of hip hop influenced sexual media” (146). This attention to chronology illustrates that the idea of what constitutes attractiveness and difference is ever shifting and displaces the persistent (but never ahistorical) association between blackness and the booty. By showing us so many iterations of what a desire for brown bodies looks like, Miller-Young explodes ideas of a stable form of blackness and depicts her actors as nimble cultural agents.

The remainder of the book fleshes out this cultural dexterity using interviews and ethnographic observations. While Miller-Young highlights the draw of pornography—a flexible schedule and the ability to make a substantial amount of money quickly—she does not shy away from describing the barriers that black women in pornography face. There is structural racism in the form of colorism and the expectations that black women adhere to white feminine beauty norms—straight hair and thin, lithe bodies. There are expenses associated with being a porn star—frequent state-mandated STI tests, travel for live appearances, and cosmetic maintenance. We hear about racism on the set when white actors fear that performing in a scene with black actors will lessen their economic value within the pornographic industry. We also hear about the lower pay scale for black actresses in comparison with white actresses. Importantly, however, Miller-Young shows how the actresses negotiate these issues in order to find pleasure in their labor: “These workers are attempting to carve out more fluid and complex meanings for black female sexualities both inside and outside the sexual marketplace—to find pleasure in moments of autonomy from exploitation and within exploitative conditions” (178). This form of agency leads some actors to embrace and market ideologies of racial difference, capitalize on social...